Welcome to the twelfth edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

The more I travel and expose myself to new people and cultures, I am finding myself looking more and more into the things that ALL humans do, irrespective of language, culture, location or time period. This is a natural byproduct of immersive traveling, but also a response to living in a modern world where people seem to focus more on the few differences we have between humans, instead of the overwhelming number of similarities.

Through this lens, religion has long been a topic that has fascinated me. It has existed in some form for almost as long as humans have, and has developed independently across the planet even before different groups of humans could ever truly travel or communicate with one another. These ideas have led me to wonder if religion was some sort of evolutionary adaptation.

One recent study out of the University of Michigan decided to look deeper into the evolutionary reasons that cause some people to be more religious than others, but the findings were beyond what I could have ever expected.

Essentially, through a robust analysis across five independent personality domains, the researchers concluded that humans who were more sensitive to feeling disgust (AKA disease-avoidance behavior), were also more likely to have higher levels of religiosity.

Put simply, the more germaphobic someone is, the more religious they are likely to be. That finding blew my mind, and it gets even more interesting.

To determine this, the five key areas assessed in each participant were: religiosity, disgust sensitivity, sexual attitudes/strategies, traditionalism/conservatism, and outgroup avoidance.

Through this robust assessment structure, the researchers concluded that people with higher disease-avoidance behavior (sensitivity to disgust) were much more likely to favor monogamy and frown upon casual sex, specifically because monogamy was linked to reduced exposure to harmful diseases or pathogens.

These sociosexual attitudes proved to be the glue that connects a person’s disease-avoidance behavior with higher religiosity. People who preferred a monogamous mating strategy were more likely to score higher on measures of religiosity.

The conclusion: The more sensitive someone is to disgust, the more likely they are to prefer monogamy, and thus to be more religious. Monogamy and religiosity function as cultural mechanisms to reduce the risk of diseases, pointing to the idea that religion evolved culturally to spread disease-reducing behaviors and increase human survival rates.

(Last week, we looked at how evolution also shaped humans’ creation of other cultural elements, literally pushing humans to form language, tools and larger groups in order to increase chances of survival.)

Capitalism and consumerism are having a tough time these days. The modern world is experiencing some of the highest levels of wealth inequality in human history, all at a time where we are watching our planet’s climate change in irreversible ways.

Between 2000 and 2019, global domestic material consumption increased by 66 percent, and it has increased 3x since the 1970s. Most of us don’t need to see any research to understand what consumerism is doing to us and our planet, or to understand how unhappy consumerism is making us all.

But that didn’t stop researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who set out to understand the relationship between consumption and wellbeing. Analyzing data from over 1,000 people, split evenly among men and women, the researchers found that people are happier and more satisfied when adopting sustainable lifestyles and resisting the temptations of consumerism.

The commitment to simple living, known formally as ‘voluntary simplicity’, leads to higher personal wellbeing for a variety of reasons, most of which are more connected to our basic human needs than to the reduction of our consumption.

Through this commitment to simple living, ‘voluntary simplicity’ provides us with more opportunities for personal interaction and social connection, such as community gardens, sharing resources, and peer-to-peer lending platforms. (AKA we rely more on each other and those around us, a truly shocking idea in 2025 I know!)

Contrary to materialist culture’s promise, accumulating possessions does not sustainably increase happiness or wellbeing. Instead, wellbeing gains were driven by psychological and achievement-based fulfillment, sourced from social connections, community involvement, and purposeful living.

The conclusion: It’s not that buying fewer things makes us happier, it’s the behaviors we engage in and connections we make while adopting a sustainable mentality, all of which pushes us to engage with and rely on others more.

Whether we admit it or not, when it comes to dating, everyone has a “type”.

I used to be someone who thought I didn’t have a type, but I was just delusional, because my type wasn’t as clear as it was for my friends. For some, their type may be more obvious than others, or might feel like something that is constant and unchangeable.

But researchers at Northwestern University decided to see if that was really true, by looking at how our perceived preferences for an ideal partner can be changed, and how those preferences shape our view of our own partners, friends, and reality at large.

Using a robust study design with two different assessment methods, the researchers first looked to manipulate the type of participants, by introducing a new trait that the researchers suggested was of higher value, to show that our type can be changed.

Not only did the research show that our type can be changed, but that once someone changed their opinions on a trait that fits their type, their actions and beliefs about their reality, themselves, and people close to them began to change too.

For example, if you recently discovered you value ‘adventurousness’ more than before, you not only became more likely to frequent locations that had more adventurous people, you also were more likely to view yourself, your friends, and even your partner as adventurous, even if nobody’s behavior objectively changed to reflect that.

I find this so fascinating because by default, humans go to great lengths to avoid the discomfort that cognitive dissonance creates inside our heads. This rule dictates almost everything in our world, so much so that we can literally change our own perception of reality, ourselves and our relationships to fit our beliefs, as opposed to actually choosing to change those things objectively.

Whether it’s with the fantasies we create about someone we are just starting to date, or the way we all craft an identity of our “ideal self” that is different from our “actual self”, humans repeatedly go to great lengths to avoid cognitive dissonance and develop a reality to safely suit our emotional needs.

The conclusion: Our type can be changed. When we value a trait, we are more interested in the feeling that we, our partner, or our close friends, embody that particular trait, instead of the reality of whether they have this trait or how much of it they have. It’s simply easier to relieve the discomfort caused by cognitive dissonance by altering or reframing our perception of reality, than it is to take the direct steps needed to change our reality.

Thanks for reading the twelfth edition!

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